America's In-basket Bulges With Issues To Solve, While Leaders Snooze

JAMES G. DRISCOLL

February 23, 1997|JAMES G. DRISCOLL Editorial Writer

This is my century, the one that's rushing to a close, not the one hidden by fog somewhere across President Clinton's preposterous bridge. There are still 2 years and 10 months before the 20th Century ends - or 3 years and 10 months, for those who believe the 21st doesn't start until 2001 - and much hard work lingers on America's agenda.

Instead of dwelling on the already wornout phrase, "in the year 2000," America ought to focus on the now: the years 1997, 1998 and 1999. One day's newspaper articles, on Feb. 20, 1997, set out enough formidable challenges to fill any nation's, or any state's, must-do list for the remainder of the 20th.

In Thursday's Sun-Sentinel, readers learned a Mexican army general who supposedly led that nation's fight against illegal narcotics was himself jailed on drug corruption charges. Can the United States stop the killer flow of drugs across the Mexican border, while cooperating with a tarnished and suspect ally?

Write that daunting question on the American agenda. Add a painful reminder: The drug trade wouldn't exist without a huge demand for cocaine and heroin in the U.S.

In China, Deng Xiaoping died at 92 and set off learned analyses of his life, which covered nearly all of the 20th Century. At age 73, he grabbed power in China - America scoffed when Bob Dole, 73, tried to win the presidency here - and held it for 12 years.

Should the U.S. persist in coddling Deng's successors, winking at vicious civil-rights violations while pumping up bilateral trade? On Cuba, should Clinton's adminstration continue the opposite policy, thundering about rights while shutting off trade?

In Florida, Gov. Lawton Chiles intensified his high-minded campaign to nurture and protect infants and children. A lame duck in his last term in any office, Chiles never has flagged in attempts to help the youngest and most vulnerable among us.

Should the Florida Legislature summon up shocking financial courage and actually appropriate $311 million for: day care for poor working families and the children of women leaving welfare, health care for elementary-school pupils and expanded adoption subsidies? Of course the legislators should do that, but I'll jot down this question under a pipedream heading.

In Boston, where police and prosecutors are succeeding amazingly well in curbing youth violence, Clinton sketched a national plan to copy the local success story. He asked for just $335 million, barely more than Chiles' request, to hire prosecutors to hammer at violent gang members, to fight truancy and help schools stay open later.

Should Congress approve that modest little plan? And how can America try to prevent youngsters from sinking to crime and violence?

Thursday's newspaper is crammed with other extraordinarily difficult issues: the medical use of marijuana, buffer zones at abortion clinics, Madeleine Albright lecturing the world as if everyone is wrong except Americans. And Barbara Walters, America's phoniest "journalist," betraying the trust, however misguided, that some gullible viewers have in her.

Aren't all those hard and perplexing questions enough to keep America focused on the here and now? The national in-basket is piled so high, America's job jar is jammed so full, that it's an abdication of duty and responsibility to gaze dreamily across Clinton's silly bridge.

He's not the first president to ask Americans to stare transfixed into the fuzzy future so they won't notice what little he's doing today. Nor is the 105th Congress the first to avoid making tough decisions, while diverting public attention from its so-far non-performance.

The nation's political leaders are coasting, content to shuffle a few cards here and there while smiling for the TV cameras. They're counting on the infamous apathy of American citizens, and it's likely to pay off.

That dismal prospect infuriates me, because this is my century. The 20th has had more than it share of scalawags and scoundrels, leavened by the good works of two Roosevelts and one Truman, among others.

It would be immensely gratifying to end this century with a bang of accomplishment, not the whimper of three years of - to borrow Truman's scorching putdown of Congress - do-nothing.